Bennett to seek top GOP post in January

Saturday

Dec 1, 2012 at 12:01 AMDec 1, 2012 at 11:26 AM

Eight months after coming out of retirement to stabilize an Ohio Republican Party torn apart by civil war, Robert T. Bennett will run for a two-year term as chairman in January with the apparent blessing of Gov. John Kasich.

Joe Hallett, The Columbus Dispatch

Eight months after coming out of retirement to stabilize an Ohio Republican Party torn apart by civil war, Robert T. Bennett will run for a two-year term as chairman in January with the apparent blessing of Gov. John Kasich.

The 73-year-old party patriarch, who became the default chairman in April after Kasich ousted state GOP boss Kevin DeWine in a bitter coup d’état, said yesterday he is uncertain whether he will serve a full term after his expected election on Jan. 18.

But Bennett said he wants to stick around long enough to ensure that a succession plan is in place “so that whoever is here will be here during the 2014 election” to assist in the re-election of Kasich and four other Republicans holding statewide executive offices.

Bennett, who might have been Ohio’s most-successful state party chairman during a 21-year reign that ended with his retirement in 2009, was cheered by the 66-member state central committee at a Downtown hotel when he announced his intention to run in January.

Before retiring, Bennett had groomed DeWine as his successor, but Kasich forced out DeWine in a successful bid to take over the party, and Bennett returned to shepherd the GOP through the presidential election. It long was thought that Kasich had a replacement candidate in mind, but two central-committee members who helped the governor oust DeWine said that he supports Bennett’s return as chairman.

“I think it’s an open question about how long he’ll stay, but right now, we’re very pleased about how things came back together and are working,” said Doug Preisse, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party.

“I would expect him to be re-elected,” said former Ohio House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson. “He made it very clear when he came back in that he wasn’t looking for a longtime situation, but I think the governor’s office is very pleased with the job he’s been doing.”

Amid this year’s intraparty turmoil, the state GOP still raised and spent $27 million to aid candidates, including the two at the top of the ticket who lost: presidential nominee Mitt Romney and U.S. Senate nominee Josh Mandel.

Bennett lauded the party’s successful effort to defeat state Issue 2, which would have changed the process that enables the gerrymandering of new legislative districts every 10 years. But he also said that party leaders must keep a commitment to reform the process, noting that the defeat of Issue 2 “was built in no small part on our assurance to community leaders, opinion makers and others that we would come back to voters with our own reform of the reapportionment process now more than 50 years old.”

Sharon Kennedy, a domestic-relations judge and former Hamilton police officer who won a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court by defeating Justice Yvette McGee Brown, a Democrat, thanked the committee for letting “an unknown girl from southwestern Ohio” run for the high court “and achieve her American dream.”

Kennedy said that pundits who credited her victory to being “born with a famous name” were wrong. She said she campaigned tirelessly for the job, including going to every gun show she could make.

“As a former police officer, I do own a firearm, and I do shoot,” Kennedy said.

Bennett ripped the Ohio State Bar Association for giving Kennedy a “not recommended” rating in her court campaign. Bennett charged that the bar committee that interviewed the Supreme Court candidates had an agenda “to change the makeup of the court into a more-liberal court.”

The bar rated McGee Brown and conservative Republican Justice Robert Cupp, who also was defeated, as “highly recommended.”

Ken Brown, spokesman for the bar association, said it has been rating candidates for the Supreme Court for 25 years “without regard to politics or partisanship” to provide voters with information. He said the bar’s committee on judicial candidates has a set of criteria that it applies equally.

“This is not a political issue; this is a qualifications issue,” Brown said.